Rice Field Ripple

Designed to complement a rice field view, drawing on the layered look of subak. Rice Field Ripple is quiet, contemplative, and ultra-eco.

The idea

This is the most restrained concept here, and the most deliberately Balinese. The form is terraced rather than freeform — shallow stepped levels that echo the geometry of the sawah beyond, so the pool reads as a continuation of the view rather than an interruption of it.

Materials stay local and unfussy: stone, planted edges, low or no coping. From the house, the eye should travel across the water and into the fields without catching on anything.

How the filtration sits

The terracing is the filtration. Rather than one regeneration zone, the planted levels step down and the water moves through each in turn — which is, in miniature, the logic subak has used across this island for a thousand years. Water moves by gravity, is used, and is passed on.

That parallel isn’t decorative. A pool designed this way holds its water rather than discharging it, and where the ground allows for recharge pits, rain landing on the property goes back into the aquifer rather than off the site.

Where it works

Properties with a rice field or valley outlook, and owners who want the pool to disappear into the landscape rather than command it. It suits long, narrow sites particularly well.

Worth knowing

Proximity to working rice fields brings real considerations — agricultural runoff, seasonal water levels, and being a good neighbour to the subak system that manages them. These are solvable, but they’re site-specific and worth raising early.